Sharing an external disk between Fedora and XP

[Paul McGarry]

I just purchased a 200gig drive and external USB/Firewire casing that
I'd like to share between my desktop/server (Fedora) and my laptop
(Win XP).

Obviously XP doesn't understand ext2 (and the only 3rd party driver I
have found is read only) and NTFS isn't fully supported on Linux.

Does anyone have any suggested solutions here?

I thought FAT32 might be the answer. However XP won't format a FAT32
partition over 32 gig so that would mean a lot of silly little
partitions. I understand that it should be able to access larger FAT32
partitions but that it simply won't create them. (I get the impression
that larger partitions might be inefficient in some way, anyone know
if that is correct?). Is there a way to partition and format FAT32
disks under linux?

Any other ideas? Otherwise I'll be stuck making it NTFS and having to
use the laptop to transfer files from my desktop rather than using the
disk directly.

Paul